


Ode to an Evolved Fox

by admiralty



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Season 11 Mulder appreciation fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-26
Updated: 2019-11-26
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:13:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,953
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21565108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/admiralty/pseuds/admiralty
Summary: A reflection upon the (more than) impossible task of loving Fox Mulder for twenty-five years.
Relationships: Fox Mulder/Dana Scully
Comments: 22
Kudos: 111





	Ode to an Evolved Fox

You never believed it before; all that bullshit about women changing men. Everyone says it isn’t true, has never been true. 

You still don’t believe it. 

Perhaps you can rationalize what’s happened; lay out every piece of scientific evidence side by side, laid bare to pick apart and dissect. Analyze the data. Find the answer, the explanation, like you’re used to doing.

But you know it’s pointless. With him it’s never been about the data, the countless traits that compile, making him the man he was, is, will become.

With Mulder, it’s pure instinct. It’s a feeling. It always has been.

You feel it when you shake his hand and aren’t quite sure what you’re getting yourself into but somehow it seems fated. It pulls you forward on a particular path, unstoppable; this drive that wills you to follow him anywhere. 

And you do. You follow him everywhere. You’ve never been the type of woman to follow a man. 

You, Dana Scully, you run. 

But you don’t run from him.

Instead you let him in, piece by piece, let him show you the wonders you would never have seen otherwise. Let him mold you, change you, improve you in ways you never thought possible.

And you do it slowly. Carefully. Because this thing between you, whatever it is, you cannot risk losing it. You cannot make this into something that will push him away because the truth is, as much as you try to convince yourself that loneliness is your choice, you need another person. 

You need _this_ person.

In what way you need him, you don’t know. You try to parse out what it all means, what he means to you; this man who’s taken up every last molecule of space in your life, every thought, every breath, every dream. Even every nightmare. You don’t know what to make of it. 

The progression is gradual, glacial. Even more so considering the intensity of your work, the force with which your worlds have been pushed together, pulled apart; like taffy, sweet but impossible. Like whiplash.

You lie awake in your Georgetown apartment and think; of what happened today, what will happen tomorrow. And how none of it would be possible if he weren’t in your life. This relationship— no, this _partnership_ , because with a partnership there is no one else, just the two of you— is the most precious thing you’ve ever had in your life and you cannot, you will not rock this particular boat. 

You let him in because you have no choice, every part in succession, like you’re performing an autopsy: clean, deliberate, tedious. 

First, his mind. That beautiful mind which inspires, teases, even arouses you. You hate it when men are smarter than you (because they rarely are) but this man is a challenge you never tire of facing. His brain stimulates your own as though it were a brand new organ. Like that feeling you get when you go skiing and afterwards physically quake from the exhaustion of using muscles you didn’t realize you had. It’s new and exciting. It’s better than sex. Almost.

Then comes his heart. It rushes in like a hurricane, a fierce love you feel in your own heart long before either of you use the word. It’s not romantic love, sexual love, not yet, at least. But it isn’t long before you want it to be. Even though your mind is telling you not to go there, this is biology. Science. Your refuge, this inexorable vestige of truth, and biology dictates this carnal desire. 

For him.

The physical, tangible evidence of this love percolates for years, and waiting only feels wrong in moments of desperation: an ouroboros; a cancer diagnosis, an ex. 

The perpetual compulsion to get on the same page, when you know it may never, ever happen.

He isn’t the guy for you. You know this deep down inside, in that place you rarely scrutinize because insisting he isn’t your perfect match in every possible way is the only thing you can do to keep yourself afloat; to keep him from pulling you underneath with him, to stop yourself from drifting down a current that will become an unstoppable whirlpool in which you’ll drown, drown forever.

Drown in him.

You never try to convince yourself you don’t love him because it’s never going to be true: you do love him, painfully, desperately. But you do try to convince yourself you could never be _with_ him, not like that, that could never be. 

He isn’t made for that.

This hesitancy keeps your partnership intact; avoiding this whirlpool, because the alternative still feels impossible. Turning your entire life over to him, to his care, is concerning.

It isn’t concerning. It’s fucking terrifying.

So you wait. You keep him at arm's length and in doing so you keep yourself safe from your own vulnerability. Waiting is how you are most comfortable.

He holds you when you need to be held, a respite from the day-to-day horrors you willingly signed up for. And he keeps his hands off you while neither of you are ready. He’s a gentleman through and through, and you love him even more for it. You both wait without feeling like you are waiting. 

Time passes in moments. Nothing happens for a reason.

There are days you feel like giving in; letting yourself get swept up in all the things you love about him, all the things that keep you awake at night, all the things that invade your dreams while you sleep. 

Mostly his eyes: the ones that feel like they were made to look at you and only you. The ones that house the trust you’ve come to expect, but also the love of which neither of you dare speak. His eyes can be frightening. You want to look into them forever; you want to look away.

You know it’s a bad idea, falling for him. So you choose loneliness yourself, again and again, for years. 

Sometimes you wish time could stop like it did back in Oregon, that you could capture it in an Erlenmeyer flask and seal it up, enable the two of you to hang suspended between here and there forever. Between now and the inevitable. Between _A_ and _C_. You wish it wouldn’t happen almost as much as you crave it.

You wish you could have known him as a young boy: before his family fell apart, before his trust was broken. Before Samantha. 

Somehow you know Samantha is a pain that will never subside, not even after he learns the truth. But your truth is that you’ve waited for this moment for seven years: the moment you know his love belongs to you and you alone. It isn’t simply a product of this quest, of duress. It’s a choice he’s been unable to make before.

_You’d die for Mulder, but you won’t allow yourself to love him._

He was right, that black-lunged son of a bitch. There are few things in life more disconcerting than your worst enemy seeing so clearly what you struggle daily to hide. 

Except, perhaps, the disconcerting realization that your worst enemy is in fact the part of yourself that keeps you from the truth.

You’ll never really know if the cancer man’s words had an effect on you; if subconsciously, the idea of continuing to live a lie had been too hypocritical to face in your perpetual search for truth. But not long after this realization, you give in. You make a choice, you allow yourself to succumb.

You go to him in the night and without words you tell him you are ready. No… you _show_ him you are ready. And from the way he accepts you with no hesitation; with longing and urgency and the deepest affection, you know he is finally ready too. This is the point of no return, the point where you give yourselves to each other entirely, completely. You trust him with the deepest love you could possibly express.

And you do love him. You love him so much you give him everything you have, all of you, every part until there is absolutely nothing left to give.

Later as you cling to each other in a dingy motel room after what feels like an entire lifetime of heartache, even as you cling to hope, you know the truth. This won’t work, it can’t work. He’ll never stop and get out of the car. He’ll never want that, even if you do.

Years later, he isn’t lying when he tells you he’s the one who hasn’t changed. He isn’t. He hasn’t.

And even though you hate yourself for thinking it, for wishing it; that’s the problem.

He chooses the darkness every time. Even when inky blackness surrounds you both until you can’t see each other anymore; until you can’t look into his eyes and find him there, eager, willing, passionate. The man you fell in love with.

You love him still. You’ll love him endlessly. 

It isn’t his fault you have to go. 

He once compared himself to a shark; told you _a shark never stops swimming_. You want him to stop swimming so badly but he won’t, he can’t stop. He’s not built to stop. If he stops, he will die.

It isn’t his fault that you fell in love with a shark.

_Loneliness is a choice._

This is the crux of your dilemma: this is the inherent contradiction of Dana Scully: that you’d fall hopelessly in love with a man who cannot be the kind of man you need. That you’d allow it to happen despite your years of holding back, despite your rational brain advising against it. That you’d follow him again and again, to the ends of the earth, to your undoing, even, desperate love your sole motivator. 

That love is what makes everything worth it, absolutely everything... until it isn’t worth it anymore.

And the final, cruel insult, is that after all you’ve lost, all you’ve sacrificed, your only option is to relinquish him as well.

You can choose loneliness again, you think. It feels good to be out of the tank for a while. But that’s the thing about tanks: the wall that separates you from him is made of glass. You can still see him, swimming around and around. He can see you. Even though you’ve left the warmth of his arms, of the bed you once shared, he is still a part of you. He swims through your veins.

All you want is him, Fox Mulder, to make a choice between you and the darkness. All you want is, for once, to see him choose the light.

It takes you a long time to see it; to really see. As it always has. 

But today, you see it.

Today, it isn’t about believing. It’s about seeing. And you see it with your own eyes.

_I don’t know if any God is listening, but I am standing right here, and I am listening. Right beside you. I’m all ears. That’s my choice._

You didn’t change him; you couldn’t, and you wouldn’t. You never wanted that. You only wanted him to want to make that choice.

He lights a candle, finished choosing darkness. For the first time it isn’t about a feeling, at least not only a feeling. It’s reason and faith in harmony. It’s A to B to C. It’s the man you’ve loved for half your life finally making a choice, and that choice is you.

You still don’t believe a woman can change a man. Because you weren’t the one who changed him. 

He did it himself, and he did it all for you.

  
  
  
  
  



End file.
